From the ‘Well It Was A Nice Idea’ department: At the press launch of The Duracell Challenge, four years ago this week, game author and industry veteran El Croatia announced: “We’ll never beat piracy so we’re going to harness it instead,” which meant giving away the game - via the Internet and coverdiscs - and encouraging players to copy and distribute it to everyone they knew. As an incentive to do this, the game contained hidden prizes, such as mobile phones, CD players and camcorders, which could be won by reaching certain levels, and – check this out - every player who passed the game on to a winning player would win the same prize.

This was made possible by every copy of the game keeping a record of the copying trail it came from. The game was a six-level exercise in product placement (six levels because Duracell last six times longer etc.) as you might expect, and the goal was to have the game installed on every PC in the world – 150 million in 1995. This would give Duracell access to the world’s biggest database of PC users, through its fingerprinting of disks for prize purposes and, in addition, create massive, worldwide brand awareness for less than the cost of a few television commercials. As to whether it worked, well, have you played The Duracell Challenge? Has anyone you know played The Duracell Challenge? Have I played The Duracell Challenge? Exactly.